Josephine Tey - The Singing Sands

In too much peace—perhaps? With too much time to think about himself and his bondage to unreason. Too much time to take his own mental and spiritual pulse.

No, of course he was not sorry that he had heard of Bill Kenrick. He was Bill Kenrick’s debtor as long as he lived, and if it took him till the end of his days he would find out what had changed Bill Kenrick into Charles Martin. But if only he could clear up this thing before he was swamped by that demanding life that was waiting for him on Monday.

He asked how Daphne was, and Tad said that as a female companion she had one enormous advantage over everyone he had ever known: she was pleased with very little. If you gave her a bunch of violets she was as pleased as most girls are with orchids. It was Tad’s considered opinion that she had never heard of orchids, and he, personally, had no intention of bringing them to her notice.

‘She sounds the domestic type. You take care, Tad, or she’ll be going back to the Middle East with you.’

‘Not while I’m conscious,’ Tad said. ‘No female is going back East with me. I’m not having any little-woman-round-the-house cluttering up our bungalow. I mean, my bun—. I mean—’ His voice died away.

The conversation became suddenly broken-backed, and Grant rang off after promising to call him as soon as he had anything to report or an idea to share.

He went out into the wet haze, bought himself an evening paper, and found a taxi to take him home. The paper was a Signal , and the sight of the familiar heading took him back to that breakfast at Scoone four weeks ago. He thought again how constant in kind the headlines were. The Cabinet row, the dead body of the blonde in Maida Vale, the Customs prosecution, the hold-up, the arrival of an American actor, the street accident. Even ‘PLANE CRASH IN ALPS’ was common enough to rank as a constant.

‘Yesterday evening the dwellers in the high valleys of Chamonix saw a rose of flame break out on the icy summit of Mont Blanc—’

The Signal’s style was constant too.

The only thing waiting for him at 19 Tenby Court was a letter from Pat, which said:

Dear Alan, they say you must have marjuns but I think marjuns is havers. waste not want not. this is a fly I made for you. it was not done in time before you went. it may not be any good for those english rivers but you better have it anyway your affectionate cousin Patrick.

This production cheered Grant considerably, and while he ate his dinner he considered alternately the economy, in capitals as well as in margins, and the enclosed lure. The fly exceeded in originality even that remarkable affair which he had been lent at Clune. He decided to use it on the Severn on a day when they would ‘take’ a piece of red rubber hot-water-bottle, so that he could write honestly to Pat and report that the Rankin fly had landed a big one.

The typical Scots insularity in ‘those English rivers’ made him hope that Laura would not wait too long before sending Pat away to his English school. The quality of Scotchness was a highly concentrated essence, and should always be diluted. As an ingredient it was admirable; neat, it was as abominable as ammonia.

He stuck the fly above the calendar on his desk, so that he might go on being amused by its catholicity and warmed by his young cousin’s devotion, and got thankfully into pyjamas and a dressing-gown. There was at least one consolation for being in town when he might still be in the country: he could get into a dressing-gown and put his feet on the mantelpiece in the sure and certain knowledge that no telephone call from Whitehall 1212 would intrude on his leisure.

But he had not had his feet up for twenty minutes when Whitehall 1212 was on the telephone.

It was Cartwright.

‘Did I understand you to say that you had had a bet on Flair?’ said Cartwright’s voice.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I don’t know anything about it but I have an idea that your horse has won,’ said Cartwright. He added, very silky and sweet like a Broadcasting Aunt: ‘ Good night, sir,’ and hung up.

‘Hey!’ said Grant, and jiggled the telephone key. ‘ Hey! ’

But Cartwright had gone. And it would be no use trying to bring him to the telephone any more tonight. This amiable piece of teasing was Cartwright’s come-back; his charge for doing a couple of buckshee jobs.

Grant went back to his Runyon, but he could no longer keep his attention on that strictly legit character, Judge Henry G. Blake. Blast Cartwright and his little jokes. Now he would have to go to the Yard first thing in the morning.

But in the morning he forgot all about Cartwright.

By eight o’clock in the morning Cartwright had sunk back into the great ocean of incidentals that bear us on from one day to the next, unremarkable in their plankton swarming.

The morning began as it always did, with the rattle of china and the voice of Mrs Tinker as she set down his early-morning tea. This was the preliminary to four glorious minutes during which he lay still more asleep than awake and let his tea cool, so Mrs Tinker’s voice came to him down a long tunnel that led to life and the daylight but need not yet be traversed.

‘Just listen to it,’ Mrs Tinker’s voice said, referring apparently to the steady beat of the rain. ‘Stair rods, cats and dogs, reservoyers. Niagara also ran. Seems they’ve bin and found Shangri-la. I could do with a spot of Shangri-la myself this morning.’

The word turned over in his sleepy mind like a weed in calm water. Shangri-la. Very soporific. Very soporific. Shangri-la. Some place in a film. In a novel. Some unspoiled Eden. Shut away from the world.

‘According to this mornin’s papers they never ’ave no rain at all there.’

‘Where?’ he said, to show that he was awake.

‘Arabia, so it seems.’

He heard the door close and dropped a little further under the surface of things for the enjoyment of those four minutes. Arabia. Arabia. Another soporific. They had found Shangri-la in Arabia. They—

Arabia!

In one great whirl of blankets he came to the surface and reached for the papers. There were two, but it was the Clarion that came to his hand first because it was the Clarion whose headlines constituted Mrs Tinker’s daily dose of reading.

He did not have to search for it. It was there on the front page. It was the best front-page stuff that any newspaper had had since Crippen.

SHANGRI–LA REALLY EXISTS. SENSATIONAL DISCOVERY. HISTORIC FIND IN ARABIA.

He glanced over the hysterically excited paragraphs and discarded the paper impatiently for the more trustworthy Morning News . But the Morning News was almost as excited as the Clarion . KINSEY-HEWITT’S GREAT FIND, said the Morning News . ASTOUNDING NEWS FROM ARABIA.

‘We print, with great pride, Paul Kinsey-Hewitt’s own despatch,’ said the Morning News . ‘As our readers will see his discovery had been vouched for by three R.A.F. planes sent to locate the place after Mr Kinsey-Hewitt’s arrival at Makallah.’ The Morning News had had a contract with Kinsey-Hewitt for a series of articles on his present journey, when that journey should be completed, and was now delirious with pleasure at its unexpected luck.

He skipped the Morning News on its own triumph and went on to the far soberer prose of the triumphant explorer himself.

‘We were in the Empty Quarter on scientific errands…no thought in our minds of human history either factual or legendary…a well-explored country…bare mountains that no one had ever considered climbing…a waste of time between one well and the next…in a land where water is life no one turns aside to climb precipitous heights…attention caught by a plane that came twice in five days and spent some time circling low above the mountains…occurred to us that some plane had crashed…possible rescue…conference…Rory Hallard and I to search while Daoud went on to the well at Zaruba and brought a load of water back to meet us…no entrance apparent…walls like the Garbh Coire on Braeriach…giving up…Rory…a track that even a goat would baulk at…two hours to the ridge…a valley of astounding beauty…green almost shocking…kind of tamarisk…architecture reminiscent of Greece rather than Arabia…colonnades…light-skinned Persian type with fine eyes…the grace and small bones of an inbred race…very friendly…greatly excited by the appearance of the plane which they seemed to have taken to be some kind of bird…paved squares and streets…oddly metropolitan…isolation due not to the difficulties of the mountain track but to lack of animal transport to carry water…desert impassable without that…in the position of a small island in an ocean of desert…as unaware what lay beyond that desert or how far it might extend as the Ancients were of what lay beyond the Atlantic…tradition of disaster, but owing to language difficulties this is surmise, being a translation of sign-talk rather than…strip cultivation…monkey god in stone…Wabar…volcanic convulsion…Wabar…Wabar….’